Many young researchers struggle with their work-life balance. Especially for researchers with a family, it is challenging to divide their time and energy between home and work. The question “is it possible to be a parent and have a career in research?” keeps many researchers up at night.

For many researchers science is a passion and for some even a calling. However, the status of sciences as “something you do for passion” is often abused by supervisors and institutions to justify bad working conditions. Unveil some myths about ‘science as a job you should do for free’ – you may take them for granted without knowing it.

There is a huge body of scientific evidence that happy team members produce better results. However, the majority of PhD students and postdocs is stressed by peer pressure, high demands by their supervisors, potentially insufficient supervision and a high degree of uncertainty about their future career. Is it better to make them all happy?

Choosing the right place for a position as a PhD student, postdoc or professor is always a key career decision. Spontaneous advice from colleagues mostly tends towards big universities. However, there are good arguments to choose for small universities.

You see these big science stars who publish in Nature and Science. They have huge grants, a huge machinery of high-class technology and a huge team of highly ambitious postdocs and PhD students who hope to publish in Nature or Science.

But you are not like that… How to handle the feelings of inferiority when you compare yourself with these science stars? And how to become better anyway?

Interestingly, most young and also more mature researchers can not define easily what “a successful career in science” means. This question is highly relevant – for example when looking for a new position, hiring people, defining long-term visions for an institution, developing funding schemes and selecting candidates to be funded.